Should an artist ALWAYS sing in his own accent and voice?

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is it so wrong for a bit of twang to enter the voice of an irishman?

― Ain., Monday, 14 March 2005 19:20 (twenty years ago)

Not if he's from the Midwest, no ;)

― Geir Hongro (GeirHong), Monday, 14 March 2005 19:22 (twenty years ago)

1960s British Invasion to thread.

― Huk-L, Monday, 14 March 2005 19:22 (twenty years ago)

I have misgivings about Australian rap sometimes. Part of me likes that it sounds so different accent-wise, part of me shudders.

― VegemiteGrrl (VegemiteGrrl), Monday, 14 March 2005 19:24 (twenty years ago)

Depends on if you like the result, I suppose. Greil Marcus has taken Lucinda Williams to task for her "exaggerated" drawl (hey, she's from the south). But apparently he has no problem with Mick Jagger's completely phony accent on "Country Honk," "Far Away Eyes," "Sweet Virginia" and countless others.

― Jazzbo (jmcgaw), Monday, 14 March 2005 20:49 (twenty years ago)

1960s British Invasion to thread.

Only if the answer is yes. If the answer is no, then white Southerners in general to thread :-)

― Geir Hongro (GeirHong), Monday, 14 March 2005 21:15 (twenty years ago)

Bob Dylan to thread.

― Ken L (Ken L), Monday, 14 March 2005 21:29 (twenty years ago)

If not Bobby Zimmerman.

― Ken L (Ken L), Monday, 14 March 2005 21:29 (twenty years ago)

No, never!

― walter kranz (walterkranz), Monday, 14 March 2005 21:30 (twenty years ago)

1960s British Invasion to thread.
It's hard to tell, but weren't the Beatles supposed to be singing in American accents?

― Ken L (Ken L), Monday, 14 March 2005 21:33 (twenty years ago)

Let me modify that a bit. If an artist truly has an interesting natural speaking voice and accent then fine, go ahead and use it. I can't think of any good examples though. Should artists just dress in whatever casual clothes they wear around the house? Should artists always use their given birth name? Should lyrics consist entirely of sentences that the artist has actually used in day-to-day conversation?

― walter kranz (walterkranz), Monday, 14 March 2005 21:35 (twenty years ago)

It's hard to tell, but weren't the Beatles supposed to be singing in American accents?

I think that was the point. The entire history of rock is white singers trying to sound black, British singers trying to sound American and vice versa, Women trying to sound like men and vice versa, etc.

― walter kranz (walterkranz), Monday, 14 March 2005 21:37 (twenty years ago)

I understand where this question is coming from accent-wise, but the notion that a person has something that can be called his or her "own" voice is kind of ridiculous from the beginning. Even among the set of vocal-sounds a person can make that are "easy" or "natural" or anyway aren't requiring a lot of concentrated modification, there are still bound to be a dozen different options, and part of singing involves picking which of those options works for a given task: what part of your range to sing in, whether to use vibrato or not, whether to enunciate or slur, whether to keep your voice smooth or let it growl or rasp, whether to project or keep quiet, and on and on and on forever and ever. Nobody has their "own" voice. And I tend to get bothered when people refer to people like Joanna Newsom or Antony or whoever as having put-on or affected voices, because -- at least in those cases -- the particular things they're doing with their voices are no more mannered or unnatural than the ways people normally try to make their voices sound "good" -- and at least they're picking a variant of their possible voices that's interesting.

― nabisco (nabisco), Monday, 14 March 2005 21:39 (twenty years ago)

I mean, the prejudice here is one of those blind-eyed “authenticity” prejudices, where people just want to feel like the artist isn’t putting work into sounding good or interesting, and just has that voice from the beginning. This is a weird thing to hope for for a few reasons: (a) there’s the fact that even a lot of the best and greatest all-natural-sounding voices involve just as much work as the biggest put-ons; (b) there’s the fact that this wish means wishing that singers actually don’t have a lot of range, and are limited to one “natural” voice, and never have to make decisions about how to approach a song; and (c) most fundamentally it assumes that hearing someone be something is necessarily always cooler than hearing someone do something, which is understandable but kind of weird and flawed. Yeah, you want the singer to embody whatever it is they sound like, to be the genuine article, but music is a performance: what about the thrill of hearing someone perform something, what about getting into what they’ve created just as much as what they just are?

― nabisco (nabisco), Monday, 14 March 2005 21:44 (twenty years ago)

The demo material I have just recorded would have sounded very corny if I had sung it (in English) completely in my own accent..

― Geir Hongro (GeirHong), Monday, 14 March 2005 21:46 (twenty years ago)

good point nabisco. when you look at artists such as bjork using the voices creatively - the question of naturalness never arises. or at least should not.

On a seperate note: anyone heard the remarkable similarity between Devandra Barnhart's voice and the old blues singer Bessie Jones [found her on an Alan Lomax cd]

the similarity is UNCanny

― Ain., Monday, 14 March 2005 21:47 (twenty years ago)

Anyway, one of the most fascinating things about a band like Madness is Suggs did indeed sing completely, and without any modification, in his own accent.

― Geir Hongro (GeirHong), Monday, 14 March 2005 21:50 (twenty years ago)

http://artists.cpu.ie/bands/101/

click on the song 'Oh' and tell me if you think there is too many affectations on the singers voice - that is, if you want...

apologies for the shameless link - but i'm not forcing you to go!

― Ain., Monday, 14 March 2005 21:51 (twenty years ago)

Men should always sing like either Jeff Buckley or Thom Yorke.

― jaymc (jaymc), Monday, 14 March 2005 21:53 (twenty years ago)

I'm a young white British male and yet my singing voice is EXACTLY like that of Louis Armstrong. I can't really explain this!

― just adam (nordicskilla), Monday, 14 March 2005 21:55 (twenty years ago)

Bjork to thread.

― nathalie barefoot in the head (stevie nixed), Monday, 14 March 2005 21:57 (twenty years ago)

What interested me Devendra-wise was the way he made such a massive jump in terms of how "affected" his voice is. Back when he was doing kind of stylized archaic recording he had all these stylized archaic vocal inflections; then very suddenly they both ramped down into something we'd consider more "natural," and even the songs started putting him much more in the center of his range, rather than way up on the high end. He made his move from stylized to accessible largely in the form of using his voice differently, no?

― nabisco (nabisco), Monday, 14 March 2005 22:02 (twenty years ago)

Lots of good points, especially from walter kranz and nabisco.

(a) there’s the fact that even a lot of the best and greatest all-natural-sounding voices involve just as much work as the biggest put-ons;
There is also the old idea of "finding your voice" - you start out copying others and then eventually figure out what you sound like. See, to take one of the many examples, Ray Charles.

wishing that singers actually don’t have a lot of range, and are limited to one “natural” voice, and never have to make decisions about how to approach a song
Like those people who think that Dylan was only a songwriter and not really a singer, to bring up Bobby Z one more time.

― Ken L (Ken L), Monday, 14 March 2005 22:10 (twenty years ago)

I have misgivings about Australian rap sometimes. Part of me likes that it sounds so different accent-wise, part of me shudders.

VegemiteGrrl OTM. Likewise a lot of recent Australian MOR country, where the delivery almost requires elements of a US accent to be true to the form.

― Nag! Nag! Nag! (Nag! Nag! Nag!), Monday, 14 March 2005 22:18 (twenty years ago)

Speaking of Australia, why is it that almost all Australian pop singers have this very distinct nasal singing voice that is so typical of Australian music in that genre? I mean, Neil Finn, John Farnham, Daryl Braithwaite, the singers in Savage Garden and Air Supply, all of them sounding very much alike. Is it something about the accent that makes this natural?

― Geir Hongro (GeirHong), Monday, 14 March 2005 22:22 (twenty years ago)

No. I'm a white Southerner and I've never adopted a Southern accent. In fact, I have a British inflection from watching too many British comedies and plenty of British cinema and from listening to even more Anglophilic grooviness and now it's stuck with me. Bloody hell. Sometimes I even affect the spelling, but not always. I refuse to utilise the excessive hyphens, after all.

― Quit glaring at Ian Riese-Moraine! He's mentally fraught! (Eastern Mantra), Monday, 14 March 2005 23:23 (twenty years ago)

Look at Prince circa "Sign O'The Times." Or the pre-"1999" falsetto.

― Alfred Soto (Alfred Soto), Monday, 14 March 2005 23:49 (twenty years ago)

bob pollard and the
strapping fieldhands
are
all
not from
great
bri
tain

― dan bunnybrain (dan bunnybrain), Tuesday, 15 March 2005 00:11 (twenty years ago)

what part of bessie jones does bevendra sound like?

― dan bunnybrain (dan bunnybrain), Tuesday, 15 March 2005 00:20 (twenty years ago)

What constitutes one's natural voice? A completely parochial un-self-examined lack of interest in several facets of the possibilities in one's voice as a melodic instrument or as a means to cultural or personal expression?

― Michael White (Hereward), Tuesday, 15 March 2005 00:24 (twenty years ago)

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